The spotlight is on survivors as their numbers dwindle The world's focus will be on the remaining survivors of Nazi Germany's atrocities on Monday as world leaders and royalty join them for commemorations on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The main observances take place at the site in southern Poland where Nazi Germany murdered over a million people, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others targeted for elimination in Adolf Hitler's racial ideology.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum says it expects about 50 survivors of Auschwitz and other camps to attend the events on Monday afternoon, joined by political leaders and royalty.
The anniversary has taken on added poignancy due to the advanced age of the survivors, and an awareness that they will soon be gone, even as rising warfare makes their warnings as relevant as ever.
The German authorities founded the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1940 in the Polish town of Oswiecim after their invasion of Poland in 1939.
